Mail for sale

Peter Mandelson's top adviser on the Royal Mail likes to quote Machiavelli. Richard Hooper stood up before a gathering of postal industry executives a couple of months ago and, in one of those scenes that seems both bizarre and utterly apposite, brought forth a choice gobbet from The Prince: "As the doctors say of a wasting disease, to start with it is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; after a time, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure." Even for a trade more familiar with logistics than Renaissance statecraft, the hint was clangingly obvious: the Royal Mail is pretty far gone - and the only option left is drastic surgery.

Mr Hooper elaborated on this view yesterday, in a report titled Modernise or Decline - but which might equally have been called Amputate or Die. The review paints a picture of a service in terminal decline, beset by labour disputes (as if on cue, more strikes are due this Friday), nowhere near as efficient as its western European competitors and ultimately no match for the free and easy delights of email. Much there will ring true even to defenders of the postal service, but neither Mr Hooper nor Lord Mandelson (who swiftly gave the independent review his approval) have much to say about how to build up the postal service, rather than manage its decline. Instead, their prescription for this vital and popular public service (despite years of cuts) is for painful surgery administered with a grimace of sympathy.

What form will that surgery take? It looks as if it will come in three parts: the government will take over the Royal Mail's pension fund deficit; the postal service will no longer have its own dedicated watchdog, but will be under the supervision of the media regulator, Ofcom, and a stake in the service will be sold to a (most probably foreign) private sector firm. Again, parts of this will appeal to defenders of the service - but the entire fixed menu is an unappetising one. If the government is going to shore up the retirement incomes of largely low-paid postal workers, that is surely a good thing - although not if it is only being done to make the Royal Mail more attractive for would-be buyers. Similarly, Postcomm has been a poor regulator and few will mourn its passing - but under Ofcom postal services are likely to be treated as just another arm of the communications industry and so subject to more vociferous private sector competition.

Still, it is the part-sale of the Royal Mail that is the most disturbing aspect of this policy. It flies in the face of Labour's commitment at the last election not to privatise the service. As for Lord Mandelson's proud claim to have already lined up a buyer, that just flies in the face of common sense. TNT, the company that did such a good job last year with official computer disks? However good the Dutch firm may be at covering a limited run of business contracts, there are bound to be doubts about its ability to provide a national service.

But the main argument against this strategy is not against its parts but the whole. Mr Hooper has laid out a thoroughly researched and well-argued plan for Britain's postal services - but it is one that lacks any positive vision. It is little different from the documents that gave the intellectual underpinning for the privatisation of our other utilities (and there is a fine irony of timing that this review was released on the same day that the energy watchdog published its investigation into why fuel bills remain so high). This is not Mr Hooper's fault, but it is the government's omission. After all, the postal network has been in business for 350 years and successfully delivers letters and parcels from one end of the land to the other, six days a week. Ministers should have begun by asking themselves how best they could build upon the achievements of the Royal Mail and the post offices. That would be a positive vision for a public service, rather than the negative one we were given yesterday.